Dropbox Investigates Spam Attack, Calls Outside Team for Help

Several users reported receiving spam on email addresses that had been specifically created for their Dropbox accounts. These complaints began appearing on Dropbox's user forums on Monday and appear to be affecting primarily European users, namely those from Germany, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. It's not clear how widespread the issue is as several users reported not having any spam problems.

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Dropbox has called in an outside team of experts to help investigate a possible spam attack against its users. While the company hasn't said so, there are reports the attack may be related to a possible data breach at Dropbox.

Several users reported receiving spam on email addresses that had been specifically created for their Dropbox accounts. These complaints began appearing on Dropbox's user forums on Monday. It's not clear how widespread the issue is, but European users appear to be the most affected, namely those from Germany, United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Since many of the users claimed the email address suddenly receiving spam was specific to Dropbox use and not being used anywhere else, it seems possible that Dropbox had been breached and email addresses of customers stolen. Some users acknowledged the other possibility that all the affected users may have been infected by a keylogger harvesting email addresses typed by the user.

"We continue to investigate and our security team is working hard on this. We’ve also brought in a team of outside experts to make sure we leave no stone unturned," the company posted on the forum Tuesday.

Recipients are seeing the messages, many of which are from "Euro Dice Exchange" and other online casinos, in the user's local language. There are several domains associated with the messages, but all of them have been created very recently, use Russian DNS servers and are registered with Chinese registrar Bizcn.

Is the Data Safe?Dropbox doesn't believe the issue has resulted in any unauthorized activity on any user accounts.

"We’ve taken a number of precautionary steps and continue to work around the clock to make sure your information is safe," the company said.

It's not clear what the precautionary steps may be.

If Dropbox really has been breached, the question is whether user data has been compromised. This can be especially worrisome for businesses, as Dropbox "has infiltrated the enterprise," Eric Chiu, cloud security expert and president of HyTrust, told Security Watch. Many employees host corporate confidential data on consumer-oriented file-sharing services without protecting the data, Chiu noted.

Back in June, there were reports Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Dropbox account had been compromised by a person who guessed the password. Consumer tools should not be used to hold confidential data.

"With external and internal breaches happening daily, this is a perfect formula for major disasters to happen," Chiu warned.

Fahmida Y. Rashid is a senior analyst for business at PCMag.com. She focuses on ways businesses can use technology to work efficiently and easily. She is paranoid about security and privacy, and considers security implications when evaluating business technology. She has written for eWEEK, Dark Reading, and SecurityWeek covering security, core Internet infrastructure, and open source.
Follow me on Twitter: zdfyrashid
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